Thomas

If you do not trust Tailscale as a company, here is an open source re-implementation of the server called headscale. Some/all clients are open source as well. So, you can review all components yourself or pay for a professional third-party review. Otherwise, if you take a binary blob from any origin, including Tailscale, and have it run with privileges on your server, there are few limits on what this blob can do. Yes, backdoors are technically possible, but probably bad for Tailscale’s business if that ever came to light.

Please submit a second copy of that letter, but replace Windows with Android, PC with Mobile, Microsoft with Google, and Edge with Chrome.

My setup is smaller, but when my venerable old router died about a year ago, I acquired an Asus TUF-AX3000_V2 where I installed FreshTomato. One can login via SSH and dump all settings for backup. Likewise, individual or all settings can be done on the command line instead of the GUI. I have a script on my computer that reads CSV files with MAC addresses and more to apply changes in an automated way.

Google is outsourcing their job to you, because you doing it for free is even cheaper than paying some poor fellow in India a dollar a day.

Did you just summarized the first episode of Gilmore Girl? 😉

Yes, XMPP with proper TLS on the server side and Conversations or one of its forks (preferably fetched from F-Droid) using OMEMO encryption should be good enough. If you are brave or paranoid, give Tox a try: https://tox.chat/

Maybe the first question is what your budget is, both regarding money and time. For example, you could buy a pre-configured NAS from Synology or QNAP, which requires less technical skills but more money, or a home-made solution reusing used components (but fresh disks for reliability). Depending on your electricity costs, you may want to choose a low-power solution or something which you power off when not used. For storage, maybe a three-disk RAID5 is a good compromise. For backups, plain S3 cloud storage encrypted via restic is a good idea.

Those of us who remember ‘Alf’ may wonder if the name is due to taste as well.

Well, you have Finland in the north-east, Ireland in the north-west, and every land border faces a Euro-zone country. Few other countries can claim the latter.

What comes to mind:

• Collect trash in nature
• Demonstrate in front of parliaments if politicians are about to make stupid laws
• Demonstrate outside of billionaires’ properties demand that they pay their fair share to society

Do not put people who strive for power into power, and vice versa.

Backups serve different purposes and if encryption by malware is a threat, you have to do backups differently, as opposed to, for example, hardware failure, where your NAS is a valid approach. To protect against encryption malware, you must make your backups inaccessible. One example are read-only backup media like DVD-ROMs. Another example is to make regular backups on tapes or HDDs and lock them up somewhere. You only take them out after you have wiped all computers that were affected by malware.

#Peertube got already mentioned, but just serving video files may already suffice. Modern webbrowsers are capable of playing videos. Some tweaking of parameters may be necessary when encoding them. Also, no frills such as dynamic adoption of bitrate/quality or high-level stuff like commenting, likes, or subtitles.

Most comments comments mention Brother, but for me, Oki is working like a charm. Using a B431dn (b/w, duplex) and a C531dn (color, duplex) with PPD files from OpenPrinting. Older models though, not sure if Oki dropped quality in favour of DRM since.

Rules of thumb:

1. Laser instead of ink unless you specifically know that you need/want ink.
2. Stay away from HP, Canon, and probably Epson. HP, like IBM, has long lost its aspiration for quality.
3. Stay away from anything that is ‘smart’ or ‘cloud’.